September 2012 Bermuda Re/insurance


63


Richard Munday examines how insurance businesses are domiciling in Bermuda to take advantage of the Island’s mature information and communications technology infrastructure.


n the last few decades, Bermuda has transformed itself from a predominantly tourism-centric economy to a world-class international business centre. Many of its international businesses specialise in areas such as insurance, reinsurance, hedge fund management and captive insurance management and Bermuda’s business climate has also evolved into one attractive to start-ups.


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A significant component of this business climate is the thriving ecosystem of information and communications technology (ICT) and managed services providers (MSPs) in Bermuda. They deliver a variety of IT services on a subscription basis to businesses and offer security, privacy and the assurance of service level guarantees.


Many companies are eagerly embracing this change in the IT industry, and the benefits are numerous. A business that is new to Bermuda can lower the start-up costs associated with building its IT infrastructure by utilising MSPs and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. An established business now has alternatives to the cost of upgrading its hardware and software every few years, which will decrease the amount of capital expenditure needed.


MSPs, IaaS and software as a service (Saas) providers enable businesses to offload the operational burden of their sophisticated and customised IT environments, which allows them in turn to reassign staff for revenue generation, and adds predictability to their IT budgets. MSP and IaaS providers are able to achieve this by spreading the cost of highly trained staff and enterprise equipment across a range of customers. By doing this they enable their clients to focus on business, rather than managing equipment, software, compliance and the staffing issues that are inevitable with complex IT environments.


One such IaaS provider is QuoVadis, which plays a leading role in developing IaaS and private cloud services for Bermuda. The QuoVadis technology platform provides international companies with the ability to rapidly deploy IT infrastructure (servers, storage, security, and telecommunications), as well as to adapt scale to keep pace with business demands. The QuoVadis platform accommodates a broad spectrum of businesses, from small start-ups looking for centralised file and print services, to complex international organisations looking for high performance computing.


“When setting up a new company, executives want to avoid IT becoming an obstacle in terms of cost or delay. QuoVadis provides cost-effective, high performance computing and data centre solutions that enable companies to hit the ground running and to retain focus on their own core activities,” said Gavin Dent, CEO of Quo Vadis.


Infrastructure and service SaaS providers have similar advantages to those of IaaS


providers, in that companies outsource software and, in some cases, hardware. The SaaS model also adds predictability to the business and the ability to scale up in times of peak demand, but with the added advantage of offloading the burden of complex software environments to the provider.


Businesses run on data. That’s why data backup and data


recovery are so critical. When data was backed up to tape and the tape transferred to a secure location, businesses had the false confidence that the data and their revenue were safe in case of an event. However, the tape medium is unreliable and hard to manage and retrieve, especially after a disaster. The reason for this is described in a study by technology research firm, Gartner which states that 15 percent of one-year-old tapes fail and 35 percent of three-year-old tapes fail. There is also significant compliance pressure to encrypt data and the speed and cost of encrypting tape backups is preventing the widespread adoption of encryption in the industry. In that regard, Gartner states that by 2014 80 percent of the market will choose advanced, disk- based appliances and backup software-only solutions.


Backup and recovery technology has evolved alongside the enterprise applications that are being protected. Today we find SaaS providers taking the disk-to-disk backups away from clients’ premises. Sending the data encrypted over the wide-area network allows data to move quickly, efficiently and safely. In addition, the backups can be stored in multiple locations, including locally to the business. This satisfies the compliance issue of offsite backups of encrypted data. In the event of a site-wide disaster—such as the activation of the office’s fire suppression system—having encrypted copies of data in an offsite, offshore jurisdiction, protects the business from prolonged disruption.


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